Rhoda Baxter's Blog

I always snap up Jane Lovering’s books when I see them on Netgalley. I’ve read nearly all the books she’s written and this one is my second favourite (the favourite is always The Boys of Christmas).
Fee is failing at pretty much every metric. She ends up drunk, dumped and very unhappy in the bar across the street from where she lives, where she stumbles upon the Monday Night Heartbreak Club. They are an odd assortment of people, all of whom have been disappointed in love in one way or another...

New book by K J Charles, sign me up!

Aaron is a police officer, a good one, who doesn’t like corruption. But he’s not so daft as to not be aware that some of his colleagues are not as ethically minded as he is. When his cousin’s engagement is broken because the fiancee took the word of a graphologist, Aaron goes to investigate what’s going on.
Joel can read personality through handwriting. Since he lost his hand in the war, he can’t find useful work, so he’s charging people for readings of...

When Clemmie gets dumped by her long term boyfriend and finds herself facing redundancy, she and her sisters get together, get drunk and cast a spell – wishing her hot sex, a job she loves and true love.

Then, she has her first one night stand. Which ticks off number 1 of that list. She later finds out that he’s a famous rockstar and if there’s one thing Clemmie knows, it’s that dating rock stars is bad, BAD news.

Clemmie gets a job babysitting Theo, who has to come up with a new album...

The book is about Scarlett, who is a chess champion – a Grand Master, and Jamie, who is a TV producer who wants to adapt her memoir into a TV show. Scarlett and Jamie have a lot of history, not all of it good, some of it great, from when they were teenagers. There’s a cataclysmic event that happened when they split up, and the effects of this are still reverberating down Jamie’s life, certainly, and possibly Scarlett’s as well.
Bold Moves is about a lot of things – hope, longing, healing, lea...

Andi is a woman raised by books. Mostly by gothic romances, by the sound of it. She gets a job cataloguing the library at Templewood house, and sees everything through the prism of the books she’s read.
But the house is spooky – there are phantom footsteps in the night and a ghost that walks around at night and a gardener who pops up at odd times. The people in the house are pretty strange too. There’s a the love lorn, but scary, Lady Tanith and her handsome son Hugo, a disagreeable housekeep...

I read this because a friend recommended it to me as ‘hilarious’. And it really was hilarious. It was a breathless run from start to finish.
The Rook family hunt ghosts. When they get called out to a small seaside town, they expect to find a few ghosts, nothing too difficult. What the actually find is the apocalypse.
I loved the dynamics between the family members and the very grounded nature of the fantastical elements. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would read the rest of the series.

I can finally tell you that The Winner Bakes It All has been shortlisted for the romantic comedy award at the RNA Awards this year! I’m very excited to be going down to London for the award ceremony.

This is the fourth time I’ve been shortlisted for an RNA award – and the third time in the romcom category (Girl Having A Ball, A Convenient Marriage and Playing For Love were all shortlisted when they were published). Fingers crossed that this time I won’t come home empty handed.

Just lo...

You know how sometimes, your image is just not tall enough or wide enough for what your need? Here’s what to do if you need to extend it a bit. This uses Canva’s generative AI (based on Dall-E, possibly), so it has all the usual foibles of AI, but it’s improving all the time.

Here’s a step by step guide. I recommend doing the extending in sections, so that the AI had lots of reference material around the area it’s trying to fill. Sometimes the results are hilarious, but most of the time, it’...

As the name suggests, you can use Canva’s new Colour Edit feature to change colours of parts of your photo. It also lets you separate out of the foreground from the background, which is really handy if you just want to make the background a bit darker, for example.

Here’s a tutorial on how to use the Colour Edit feature and a few examples of what you can make with it. This would be a super useful tool to use when making book covers.

Just hit the big red play button to watch the video on Y...

Have you ever wanted to make your book cover come alive by animating parts of it? Now you can do that easily in Canva. Most of this is available on Canva free, so there’s nothing stopping you now!

Just hit the big red play button to watch the video on YouTube.

You can sign up for a free Canva account here: partner.canva.com/Jeev*

If you want to talk to other authors about how to use Canva in your book marketing, come and join the free Canva Tips for Authors Facebook group at faceb...